Derrida

[Paul Mackin]

I thought it might be interesting to look at what Terry Eagleton (whose
NEW book I just read) was saying about J.D. back about the same time
Culler was writing.

"If the American deconstructionists considered that their textual
enterprise was faithful to the spirit of Jacques Derrida, one of those
who did not was Jacques Derrida. Certain American uses of
deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure 'an institutional
closure' which serves the dominant political and economic interests of
American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new
techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately POLITICAL
practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system
of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and
social institutions, maintains its force. He is not seeking, absurdly,
to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings,
identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to
see such things as the effects of a wider and deeper history--of
language, of the unconscious, or social institutions, and practices.
That his own work has been grossly unhistorical, politically evasive and
in practice oblivious to language as 'discourse' is not to be denied: no
neat binary opposition can be drawn up between 'authentic' Derrida and
the abuses of his acolytes. But the widespread opinion that affirms a
realm of pure difference in which all mean and identity dissolves, is a
travesty of Derrida's own work and of the more productive work which has
followed from it."

Literary Theory, p. 148